


Inhuman

by Twigwise



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Cecil is a monster, M/M, Trans Male Character, he is not trans that's carlos, the previous tags imply that cecil is a monster for being trans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-17
Updated: 2013-07-17
Packaged: 2017-12-20 12:55:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/887518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twigwise/pseuds/Twigwise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Both Carlos and Cecil are keeping secrets. Carlos dismisses his own in light of the theory that his boyfriend is more than what he appears. As with any theory, it bears investigation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inhuman

**Author's Note:**

> My first WTNV fanfiction. I hope to write more, ahah....
> 
> Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to format all the nice italics and such in these things. Oops?

Carlos was fairly certain, though he couldn’t explain how, that Cecil Baldwin wasn’t quite human.

He wasn’t sure how he was certain, of course. After all, there were far stranger things in Night Vale than the radio show host. But there was definitely something incredibly off about Cecil. It wasn’t his eyes, how they were blue and hypnotic and so very blue. It wasn’t how, despite being a man of average height and weight (and everything about Cecil, really, was painstakingly average, in a good way) Cecil managed to look like he’d been stretched through a taffy puller, as though there was something in him just barely holding him up. It probably had something to do with how he was incredibly pale, for a man that lived in a desert community and was an upstanding member of such, and he definitely didn’t blush a healthy shade of red when flustered, but a kind of off-purple. Even that, though, wasn’t quite it.

So, as with the house-that-wasn’t-real, Carlos was operating on little more than a few calculations and good old scientific gut feeling, because he didn’t really have the nerve to poke it. Metaphorically speaking.

 

(It was a shame, Cecil lamented in the inky black of his shag-rug-walled bedroom, that another thing that was “perfect" about Carlos was his normalcy. He was so perfectly human, and Cecil was so very not.)

 

Weird things happened around Cecil. For example, as Carlos noticed early on in his stay in Night Vale, time didn’t seem to work properly for him. Not that time worked properly in general, as he later found out, but especially not for Cecil. Not while he was in the Night Vale Radio studio, at least.

Occasionally on the nightly show, Cecil would report that he was summoned to investigate something by Station Management, such as when a sinkhole that emanated a strange green- or was it lilac?- light suddenly erupted in the studio’s parking lot. Cecil had put on an advertisement, and when said ad ended, he reported having climbed into the sinkhole and found fifty-foot rock-candy crystals growing into the studio’s basement.

Now, he couldn’t have done such a thing in the two minutes that it took for the advertisement for Krispy Kreme Vacuum-Glazed Doughnuts ("they’ll take your breath away!") to air. When he’d asked Cecil about it, though, the radio host just shrugged and said that any professional reporter had an impeccable sense of timing.

More than that, though, was the fact that he knew about things as they were happening. At first, Carlos thought that perhaps he was getting instant news bulletins, but then there was the night that Cecil told a story about a man that moved into town recently and kept to himself. As it was happening. It was only then that Carlos looked back on most of the other “breaking" reports he had heard since moving to Night Vale and realized there was never any indication that Cecil was actually getting the news from an outside source. Merely that he had it literally as it happened.

 

(Some days it was incredibly difficult to keep himself from gazing lovingly at Carlos. Not with his painstakingly-human and average eyes that he worked very hard to maintain and smiled broadly when Carlos said they were “nice." No, it was far harder to abstain from looking at the scientist with his quite attractive, if he did say so himself, third eye. It was a very handsome third eye, as far as such things went, vibrant and all-seeing and all-hearing for a good ten-mile radius, but, well, it wasn’t very human. And considering Carlos’s reaction to his neighbor sprouting a very nice pair of snails’ eyes, he probably wouldn’t take kindly to Cecil’s own lovely omniscient orb, which did not, under any circumstances, make Cecil feel upset and self conscious.)

 

Cecil Baldwin was definitely not human.

Carlos wrote that in his field journal in shaky hand and felt-tipped marker (which, being that it wasn’t a pen, was perfectly legal), as if actually seeing the words would help him believe it.

The two of them had been out for dinner- their second date, in fact- and he had looked out the window towards the setting sun, an interesting shade of lime green against the coal-dust sky. He’d turned back to Cecil, a small grin on his face, as he prepared to explain his theory as to why the sunsets in Night Vale were so very different from those in the outside world, and was stopped dead in his tracks by a vibrant, shining eye gazing right at him.

Now, it wasn’t like the eyeballs that occasionally floated around Big Rico’s. Those were Perfectly Normal Government Mandated Surveillance Tools that were Not To Be Questioned, and therefore completely out of Carlos’s mind by this point. No, this one was very strange, mostly because it was attached to his boyfriend. Literally, in fact.

Carlos, ever tactful, took a sip of his soda, blinked twice to see if he was hallucinating things because of a city-wide Ocular Broadcast System message, and then gestured at the very colorful eye.

"How long have you had that, then?"

Cecil looked up from his wheat-and-wheat-byproduct-free pizza (with his entrancingly blue and slightly-more-human eyes) and blanched. Well, Carlos had assumed that that’s what people did, when they blanched. He’d never really seen the expression before, only read about it. Perhaps Cecil was broiling. Or microwaving. That train of thought had distracted Carlos for just a moment before snapping back to reality.

"Um." Cecil wasn’t often lost for words, but it was usually in relation to Carlos when he did. “Oh," he continued, flushing an interesting shade of purple and blinking the third eye closed quickly, “You know. Since I was born."

It was almost endearing to Carlos to see how hard Cecil had been trying to play it off; it put his mind at ease, in a way. It helped, of course, that flustered-Cecil was incredibly-adorable-Cecil, and there could not possibly be anything sinister about something so cute. (Carlos ignored, of course, that Cecil probably thought the same about the terrifying levitating cat Koschek. Then again, Cecil was strange.)

So, despite wanting to be unsettled at the time, Carlos had smiled, took a bite of his pizza, and simply said “Well, there’s no point to hiding it now. Besides, it’s quite, ah, nice looking."

The ecstatic grin on Cecil’s face was more than worth Carlos’s discomfort later. And, as he had followed his notes up with later, it didn’t really change anything about Cecil, he just knew a bit more about the man- probably a man, at least- now. And so he had resolved to pay more attention to Cecil and definitely kept any and all panicked screaming to the town-mandated screaming hour between three and four AM.

 

(Very few people in town knew exactly what Cecil meant when he gushed the next day- “Oh. My. Gosh. And he said he liked my eyes. Can you believe it, listeners?"- but those who did smiled softly and whispered a kind “good for them" as they vacantly stared out their windows at the waterspouts that were doing their best to flood the dust plains just outside of town. Cecil himself, of course, was beaming in his studio. If anyone were to see him they’d swear he was glowing. At least, his eyes. But interns tended to avoid him while he was hosting his show, and Station Management was never exactly big on commenting on anyone’s appearance, or really leaving their office, so it wasn’t something he paid much mind to.)

 

Whatever Cecil was, things had a tendency to go very well for him, unless he was around Carlos. Then, the scientist mused, things broke. A lot.

It wasn’t that Cecil had bad luck- quite the contrary, in fact. No matter what, his problems with Station Management, or with the doppelgangers brought on by the sandstorm months past, or any possible disputes with government officials and Steve Carlsburg, Cecil had a tendency to come out on top. It was almost as though the universe was programmed to like him. (Of course, Carlos would muse, rolling his eyes at another one of Cecil’s long-winded gushing rambles about him, it was incredibly hard not to like Cecil.) 

All of that seemed to fade away when he was near Carlos, or talking about him, though. Carlos would have been flattered if his scientific interest didn’t make him incredibly interested in the anomaly itself. After all, a constant law such as Cecil’s incredible good luck should not be affected by one such as he.

So, when Cecil came over for dinner and several beakers and hot plates knocked themselves off a table approximately ten feet behind him while Carlos’s back was turned, leaving Cecil himself looking incredibly mortified, Carlos just shrugged, handed him a broom, and went back to his attempts at making Mac’n’Cheese without the use of actual cheese. Later, he recorded that, and several other things that had broken, mysteriously floated across the dining room, or just plain been reorganized while his back was turned over the course of the night.

Cecil, of course, had told Carlos he should be listening to the weather better, didn’t he hear about the sporadic miniature tornadoes that were supposed to be cropping up all day?

Carlos mused that he would have believed it if not for how even Cecil’s shadow seemed to be writhing in embarrassment at all the events.

 

(The next night Cecil opened up the radio broadcast with a cryptic “Remember, you are the boss of your limbs, even if they make a democratic vote otherwise.” He’d spent the night before scrying with his best obsidian and bloodstone bowl, as any nervous boyfriend or girlfriend may do when worried about how a date went, and had ended up concluding that it was a complete disaster. The next few hours had been devoted to scolding every one of the tentacles that had taken it upon themselves to be a nuisance, as it was incredibly rude, after all, and made him worry even more about how Carlos would react to seeing them. Few people ever reacted well, after all.)

 

Over the weeks Carlos became more and more accustomed to the little abnormalities about Cecil. In the back of his mind, sure, he was aware that when he’d first arrived to the town, he would be terrified. But as it stood, his ever-growing binder of observations about Cecil and whatever he was (a thick thing rapidly becoming more of a scrapbook of pictures and notes in margins- isn’t it so cute how Cecil’s third eye tears up when he watches a sappy movie, aren’t all his teeth just so enchantingly perfect, all seventy of them, isn’t he so handsome when he brushes his hair so it accentuates his cheekbones and makes him look about three times as tall- and any self-respecting scientist would have seen it as more of a lovestruck man’s journal than a real binder of notes.) he was recording his findings with less of a shaky hand, and less of a professional air.

Eventually, he stopped recording altogether- there didn’t seem a point; he wasn’t really going to reach any conclusions from all these notes, and he could remember Cecil’s quirks and traits just fine without them.

Like how when Carlos idly pet his hair one day, Cecil- apparently involuntarily, as he looked quite shy when he’d realized what he’d done- twisted his head a good 180 degrees, letting out a satisfied hiss that sounded more like a bird than a radio host. At one point Carlos would have found that unsettling, but Cecil had looked so sleepily satisfied with being gently scratched under his upside-down chin Carlos couldn’t really help doing anything other than chuckling fondly.

Or when they sat, barely holding hands in the parking lot of the Night Vale Local Drive-In, watching a documentary about Mountain Apologists, it felt like Cecil was wrapping a comforting arm around Carlos’s shoulder, when clearly his hand was busy fiddling with Carlos’s own.

Or the interesting timbre that Cecil’s voice adopted when talking about Serious Matters on the news, as though a mountain itself had decided to speak through his mouth. It wasn’t exactly something that could be picked up by the station’s microphone, so when Carlos had first heard it he’d almost dropped his squid-and-cilantro-with-habanero-cream burger in shock. Other Night Vale citizens in the park where they were dining, of course, just glanced over, shrugged, and resumed their idyllic previous position of chanting in Ultra-Latin while bowing towards the fifty-foot diamond tower that had manifested just the night before. So, despite the fact that it had made a portion of his mind tilt sideways out of reality, not unlike the Honorable School Board Chairman Glow Cloud’s announcements to the PTA and greater Night Vale area, Carlos shrugged it off and attempted to rescue the remains of the squid he’d been attempting to eat (much to Cecil’s displeasure) from the clutches of the overly-large desert ants.

Or, most intriguing of all, the half-sleeves of tattoos that adorned Cecil’s upper arms, and if Carlos had been one to speculate, his back and chest as well. Blackwork designs, as intricate as the day was unnaturally long in Night Vale, looking like solid and weaving thorns and flowers, something that may be an octopus here and a bird there. It was hard to tell. It seemed like whenever Carlos blinked, they rearranged themselves, ever so slightly, so they were never the same way twice. Cecil didn’t show them off often, certainly not often enough for Carlos to get a good look at the designs and the rune-like lettering that seemed to hide in them. At least, not without his eyes feeling like they were about to buzz out of his head.

It was interesting to note, though, that any time Cecil did something slightly less-than-human without meaning to, Carlos would always catch him looking as though he was about to be scolded. Which was, of course, quite ridiculous; there was no reason to say anything about Cecil’s quirks, other than in a scientific light. Of course, as soon as Carlos asked anything about him- “Scientifically, of course.”- Cecil would practically (or literally) light up, and even if his explanations were more breathless half-sentences than actual scientific data, it was more than Carlos expected, so in the end it all evened out.

 

(Despite Carlos’s perfect humanity, Cecil found himself wondering more and more with every day whether Carlos, perfect, beautiful, brilliant Carlos, would be, well, perhaps, accepting of his less-than-human nature. He melted, well and truly (though not literally, that was expressly forbidden by the Night Vale Water Committee) whenever for just a moment, he forgot himself just a little, and Carlos found another one of his unfortunate tendencies away from the realm of Homo Sapiens Sapiens not only okay, but even- dare he say it?- endearing. It could well be that Carlos would be more understanding than even other people and Night Vale were, but Cecil had had more than enough wishful thinking in his life, because he was of course a man of facts and the news and gentlemanly honor, and would not make any untoward motions in that direction until he was absolutely sure it was okay.)

 

For all his musing about Cecil’s dubious humanity, Carlos eventually found himself thinking, it was interesting that he himself was keeping an even bigger secret in his own genetics. It wasn’t really his fault, of course, there just hadn’t really seemed to be the proper time to tell Cecil. Such a thing, of course, required the right mood and, of course, the data showing that there would be no negative reaction when such information was received. As a scientist, Carlos knew the importance of such things. As a very nervous man that did not want to ruin a relationship with an incredibly doting boyfriend, he knew it doubly.

 

(“Remember, when the shoe fits, there is often another one, lying in wait,” was the opening statement from Cecil earlier that night on the radio show. It sounded right at the time. Omniscience can be a little vague sometimes.)

 

Was perfect timing when you and your boyfriend are making out, heatedly, on his couch? Carlos wasn’t sure. There was no laboratory procedure for coming out, of course, but considering how flushed the two of them were (Carlos a deep red under his stubble and incredibly manhandled hair and askew glasses, Cecil a lovely light violet from where he was pinned beneath Carlos) and Cecil’s incredibly eager sounds any time they broke apart for air, it was more than likely a “now or never” scenario.

“Cecil-” he started, and then broke off, as he couldn’t really talk that well with the other man’s lips feverishly crushed against his. Reluctantly, he pulled away, hands planted on Cecil’s shoulders as he took a deep breath. “Cecil, I regret to inform you- that is- I’ve been keeping a secret, unfortunately.”

Predictably, all Cecil could really respond with was, “Oh?” Shakier, huskier, of course, than typical, but Carlos had almost smacked his forehead in frustration. “Are you a member of the Sheriff’s Secret Police? Because I don’t really peg you for the type, you see, and I thought we really had a connection here and I really will be upset if-”

“Cecil.”

Three incredibly colorful eyes, slightly distracted, met Carlos’s own, and he had to fight the urge to laugh, which really would have killed the mood in more ways than one.

“I’m not a member of the Secret Police, okay? I’m fairly sure the Sheriff could do far better than a scientist like me.” Preemptively, Carlos placed a finger over Cecil’s mouth to restrain him from a tangent about how they should be honored to have the best citizen in Night Vale on the squad. From somewhere that probably wasn’t his chest, Cecil rumbled contently. “I should have told you months ago, but I didn’t really know how to do it. You see, I wasn’t, um, born a man, if that makes sense.”

Of all the reactions he had been expecting, Cecil beaming like he’d won the lottery was probably lowest on Carlos’s list.

“Oh, happy day! I thought I was the only one-!”

“What- No, Cecil, I meant, I was born human, just-"

Carlos’s clarification had come about a half-second and a twist in reality too late. Where one moment earlier, he’d been sitting firmly in Cecil’s mostly-human lap, he was now tangled in what seemed to be miles of incredibly smooth and warm tentacles. He couldn’t tell; a primal part of his brain was making small terrified sounds and telling him that under no circumstances was he to open his eyes.

“Cecil. I’m human, I just meant I’m tr- I was born female and am male now, not- what did you even do?”

“Oh.” Cecil’s voice was now somewhere one tone off from rending metal and rockslides and whalesong, though still very much Cecil. “Well, I can go, ah, back- I know this kind of thing isn’t very normal for humans-”

“No, it’s not.” He took a steadying breath and shifted an arm through the whatever-it-was holding him gently, rubbing his temples slowly. “Just, ah, give me a minute to overcome the whole “fight or flight” response I’m having here, okay?”

There was a low noise of worried assent from somewhere above- or perhaps below, maybe somewhere to his left- and a strangely comforting non-hand ran over Carlos’s back. He gave himself a few moments to collect himself (“Remember, Carlos,” he was repeating silently, “this is still Cecil, just a bit different looking- Carbon is still Carbon whether coal or diamond, after all.”) before slowly, very slowly, opening his eyes.

“And I thought I was hiding something,” was the first thing he could manage to say. As it turned out, he was in fact nestled in a tangle of tentacle-like appendages, an indescribable color somewhere between purple and ink and static and heatwaves. With a shaky exhale, he traced down the nearest one with a finger, dimly noted its fleshy-but-rubbery texture, and smiled sheepishly at the pleased shudder it drew out of Cecil. That wasn’t too bad.

Eventually, after what seemed like an age (but was probably only a few minutes, if time was flowing properly, which was questionable in Night Vale, let alone around Cecil) Carlos managed to properly look at Cecil.

His face and most of his torso, at least, were what Carlos had come to expect from Cecil. Strangely, the accumulation of tentacles (some with eyes, some with octopus-like suction cups, others just smooth and sinewy) seamlessly growing from his back and lower half didn’t look out of place on him; in fact, it looked like they’d rather been missing previously. Which, Carlos noted, they were. Other than the multitudinous new extremities, though, Cecil was, as always, the man he’d been before. Something about that- his presence, if not appearance- was quite comforting.

Carlos smiled weakly. “So…. would it be rude of me to ask you what you are?”

“Not at all!” Cecil beamed, his voice not really seeming to come from his mouth at all, but rather all around the two of them. “my mother was a very lovely woman from here in Night Vale, bless her, and my father is a very respectable lower-tier Elder God known as-"

Unfortunately, no mortal collection of vowels and consonants can replicate the name of the Outer God of Knowledge, so it may just pay to say Carlos was rattled by the name.

Cecil still looked rather pleased, though, like a kindergartener having written his name for the first time. So Carlos swallowed his fear, both metaphorically and literally, and chuckled.

“I really really hope you don’t expect me to say that.”

The look on Cecil’s face ranged from shocked, to confused, to ecstatic, all in the course of a second. “So…. this isn’t particularly frightening to you?”

“What? No, I’m sure I’ll have a good old-fashioned terrified scream later, honestly.”

“Oh.”

And then Carlos chuckled, sprawling comfortably across Cecil with a sigh, one hand fiddling with a nearby tentacle and the other holding one of Cecil’s.

“I’ll get used to this, though, don’t worry. Just, ah, give me a little time, okay?” After all, it was true- He’d adjusted to Night Vale, he’d adjusted to Cecil’s other quirks, and he was perfectly certain he could acclimate to being in a relationship with a half-eldritch being.

“Really?” Carlos looked up to see Cecil’s face lighting up- literally, as his eyes were glowing- with a smile.

“Really, Cecil. Scientists don’t really lie, after all. Bad for the data.”

So it turned out, in the end, that Cecil Baldwin wasn’t quite human. In Night Vale, Carlos mused, far worse things could happen.


End file.
